Today the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad told the Turkish Cumhuriyet newspaper that he totally regrets shooting down the warplane. But really, what does regret mean to a dictator like al-Assad? "I say 100 percent, I wish we did not shoot it down," Assad told the paper (which was translated by The New York Times), adding that his gunmen thought the war plane was Israeli. How, exactly, that makes it better is beyond us.